How Westar Energy Revolutionized Customer Engagement with Interactions IVA

Challenges

While Westar Energy’s traditional IVR was getting the job done, it was managed in-house and had little support. Because of this, analytics were slim and tedious to obtain, and there was no ability to listen to calls to understand why customers needed support. Without these crucial analytics, Westar Energy was unable to detect, and therefore fix, issues with the technology.

Westar Energy needed a solution that could better handle their volume of self-service customer inquiries, and provide better insight to the customer experience, so they could add functionalities and improve the solution moving forward.

Solutions

After looking at other cloud-based solutions, Westar Energy decided they wanted something more intuitive than a typical, menu-driven IVR and wanted a solution that would provide better analytics so they could figure out what their customers were trying to get done and why. Interactions worked closely with Westar Energy to implement an Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA). Westar Energy was able to add functionalities that its legacy IVR was unable to complete, including updating email addresses and phone numbers which cut down on average CSR handle time as well as providing proactive outage messaging that gives customer an update on their outage as soon as they called in.

Westar Energy’s goal was to provide efficient self-service, even if that means transferring a call to a live agent. With their new solution from Interactions, they were able to include an option that allows its customers to go straight to a live agent when that option is preferred.

Results